Maasai Mara
KENYA
A Two-Buck-Chuck Safari
By LYNDI
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Let’s face it. Nobody comes to Kenya to see the beautiful streets of Nairobi (nice as they were). If you’ve flown halfway around the world to get here, you’re here to see the wildlife. So when we found out that you can book tours to the Maasai Mara National Park for an affordable price – our entire itinerary changed.
We were picked up early Saturday morning by our guide George in a “safari-converted-van” – sorry, I have no idea what to call it. It’s basically your standard 9 passenger van, but the roof pops up so you can get panoramic views of the savanna and better photos of the animals. We loaded up 6 other passengers and then headed into the wild.
Maasai Mara is only about 5 hours from Nairobi, so after a lunch stop in Narok and a few stops for photo ops and flat tires, we arrived in our camp just outside the park’s boundaries around 4pm.
Now Aaron and I often view backpacking like buying a bottle of wine. If you’re paying a ton of money, you’d better get something good. Likewise, if you’re looking for the cheapest option, you’d better not be disappointed when it’s so bad you can’t finish it and have to use it for cooking. So when we pulled into our camp we were really impressed. It was like getting a Napa Valley single vineyard when we’d paid for a Two-Buck-Chuck!
Since we’d gone with the most budget option we could find, we’d fully expected to crawl into little tents, set up our mats and sleeping bags, and have to avoid hyenas and rogue elephants when going to the bathroom at night. But these “tents” were permanent structures with wood-posted beds, sheets and blankets, and attached bathrooms with hot showers! This was a luxury safari in our books!
Our first afternoon game drive took us out into the open savannah for about 2½ hours in the early evening – and if what we saw in those 2½ hours was any indication of what the rest of the tour would be like, we were in for a treat.
We were first greeted with herds of zebras and wildebeests just inside the park gates and it didn’t take long to come across gazelles, impalas, mongoose and giraffes. Even things that you normally may not think you’d be excited to see – like herds of African buffalo – actually end up being fascinating just watching them in the wild. And before you know it, you have 60 photos of buffalo that all look rather similar.
The highlight of the night was encountering a pride of lions slowly sauntering off to hunt for dinner. When we approached them they were resting under a tree – though with heads up and alert, meaning that they’re looking for dinner – and then one by one they headed towards a herd of buffalo in the distance. It was incredible how little our car disturbed them. They watched us approach, didn’t even give us the time of day, and then walked right by the front of our car so that we could all get some nice photos of them.
The next entire day and the following morning were game drives as well. It’s interesting how fickle humans are. Where we spent half an hour at a zebra or giraffe sighting on Day 1, by Day 2 we told George to carry on so we could get to the bigger and better stuff. And we saw it all: hyenas hopping by, elephants surrounding our vehicle, warthogs happily hopping through the grass, male lions playing with their cubs, hippos wading in the water, baboons chasing each other, and even a cheetah relaxing on a warm rock. Even when we weren’t surrounded by wild animals, just standing up in the van and having the fresh air hit your face as you view the vast grasslands dotted with wildlife in the distance was exciting.
Overall, we both had a fantastic safari experience – from the wildlife we saw, to our guide being able to tell us anything and everything we could possibly want to know about the animals (for example – did you know that warthogs have such short memories that when lions chase them into their burrows, all the lions have to do is wait outside, because in three minutes the warthogs forget why they’re there and come back out? Haha!), to our luxury tent and the excellent food, the total experience was easily a highlight of our time in Africa.
And I must say it also completely changed my perspective on Mother Nature. Up until now, I’d always thought that the prey had kind of drawn the proverbial “short straw” – living every day in fear of being eaten alive never seemed like a lot of fun to me. But after being out in the open with all the buffalo, gazelles, and other tasty treats, I definitely see that Mother Nature favors the prey.
All of the animals on the savannah work together to avoid the lions, cheetahs and hyenas. Birds that eat ticks off of buffaloes backs also are an early warning system for them and fly away when their keen eyesight spots a predator. Herds of zebras confuse the predators when they are running because the stripes all blend together. Elephants and hippos will gang up on the lone predator and sometimes kill the killer. And predators can also easily become prey – baby cheetahs can get separated from their moms when she goes a long distance to hunt for food and then are easy snacks for hyenas and large birds. Male lions will kill all cubs not belonging to him to establish his dominance amongst a pride. Maybe all this is something I could have learned at school or that great “Planet Earth” program, but seeing it in person revolutionized my world. Or close to it maybe.
After our morning safari on Day 3, we headed back into the town of Narok for our last lunch, tipped our guide and said our goodbyes. From there, most of the passengers on our tour were headed back to Nairobi whereas Aaron and I were headed to Nakuru so we could carry on to the west and head towards Uganda, so we were put in another vehicle with a tour going that way. We talked to an English couple that had just done nearly the exact same tour that we had just done, except I was surprised when they didn’t have anything good to say about it. They didn’t like sleeping in a tent on their vacation (hey – they paid for the Two-Buck-Chuck, too), they were in a vehicle all day and couldn’t get out and walk around (ummm… lions eat people), and they had rice and beans at nearly every meal (not succulent lamb with couscous and chilled grapes being fed to you one by one like they thought?).
It just made Aaron and I glad that we had the group we did – everyone would talk about what a great day it had been around the dinner table. It just goes to show that expectations and one complainer can sorta spoil a good trip. (Although, on a side note, we did have one Spanish guy ask George if we could see something different on the last game drive. George told him no – you go to a zoo to see that.)
And speaking of zoos – we’ve all been to them. In fact, we’ve all seen what Aaron and I just paid $300 each to see, but there is something really unique about seeing them in the wild. You can see the male lion interact with his cubs, you can watch the little cubs fall out of trees because they don’t know how to climb yet, you can watch waterbuck run into trees because their eyes are on the side of their heads and they can’t see in front of them, and watch chameleons dance across the road (they put their foot forward four times before they finally step on it and continue – it’s ridiculous).
Maybe it’s the same reason we visit the vineyard of a wine we already know we love – to see where it comes from (okay, did I take that wine analogy too far? Sorry, I’m done). At any rate, being able to enjoy what’s left of Africa’s natural world was incredible, and we’re just hoping that the exorbitant rates tourists now must pay to access it will go towards protecting it in the future.
